


Catalyst

by deathwailart



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Earthborn (Mass Effect), F/M, Indoctrination Theory, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 11:09:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2107593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She watches herself burn over and over. </p><p>Written for the 30 day drabble challenge: catalyst</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catalyst

She watches herself burn over and over.  
  
At first she doesn't recognise the face other than it looking eerily familiar; leaving Earth was hectic, terrifying, a Reaper so close and on her home planet when she thought they'd have more time, especially after what happened to that batarian colony by her own hand. It's a child who needs help, a small girl in torn clothes with cuts on her face, a girl cowering. A life she can't save, gone when she turns away. A little girl somehow scrambling onto a shuttle as she watches, the Reaper bearing down and she wants to scream for the soldier to stop clutching his gun and to help her but her words will be lost to the sounds of the Normandy and the shuttles, that noise the Reapers emit that she feels through her knees and up to her teeth.  
  
She can't watch what happens after the beam hits the shuttle. They're already losing lives and the Reapers have only just landed. They've got the mission. Mars. The first nightmare comes en route to the Citadel when Kaidan might be brain dead or dying or both. She just watched a child – someone who should be innocent, who shouldn't have to see this – die when they thought they were safe. Kaidan is injured and she never got to patch things up with him or say that she loves him, that she's sorry, that she wants to fix things.  
  
She runs in the dark, whispers in her ear, oily shadows and watches the girl burn.  
  
The thing is that Saoirse doesn't have many photos of herself from childhood. A few grainy security shots. Probably the official ones in the files when she was bounced through homes and foster families because she was good in school but a hell raiser, the girl who got into fights and had a temper and sometimes had terrible headaches because they found out later that she most likely was born to a mother who'd been exposed to element zero when pregnant. Most likely. Her mother left her in the hospital the day she was born, skipped out and that was that. She's not ashamed of her past anymore but apart from getting her Reds tattoo redone after Miranda brought her back, she doesn't dwell on it, not enough to really remember how she looked as a child.  
  
It's when it doesn't stop that she really looks, when she's running and the voices of the dead are following her, never able to run fast enough, never catching up, that light in the dark (and it's so dark, dark and the world is blurring at the edges and she remembers Benezia's anguished words, the jerking marionette motions of the dead commando, the way the dead krogan voice echoed in the cavern) until they burn. Until she stands with that child in her armour and she sees the similarities; the dark hair, the shape of the nose, the green eyes, the same defiant set of the mouth.  
  
It's a hell of a thing in the end, staring down herself when she's bleeding from an injury she doesn't remember, when Anderson is gone, the closest thing she's ever had to a father who didn't make it. The echo in the Catalyst's voice as they talk, her voice as it is now and as it was when she was an angry little girl with bloodied knuckles.  
  
There's fire when she raises her gun and strides to finish the mission. She breathes easier, moves easier, her head is finally clear.  
  
If she's going to burn, she's going to do it on her own terms.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is actually so I can get my ideas down on how I headcanon the ending of me3; the starchild throughout the game in my headcanon resembled Saoirse (honestly I think for all of my Shepards it looks like them, I prefer it to the creepy regular kid) and it utilises parts of the indoctrination theory.


End file.
